The Icelandic Lean Inception Workshop

On the 7th of January D-CENT partners from NESTA, W3C, ERCIM, Forum Virium Helsinki, Neo arrive to Iceland where IMMI and Citizen Foundation welcome them. Over the next 2-3 days the team held vision meetings, deliberated, coded and conducted user interviews.

In the dark twilight zone of the New Year, the D-CENT project team headed to Reykjavík Iceland with the goal of doing a lean inception user interviews of user of Better Reykjavík and carve out a joint vision for the direct democracy tools we aim to build together.

Thus the workshop spanning a few days, it was focused on human interaction, brainstorms and pure coding. We also had actual findings of real human fact finding stories based on their experience of direct democracy participation in the past with Better Reykjavík. The service uses the open source Your Priorities app that helps people create groups around issues that are important to them. The tool/app allows people submit new ideas, debate and discuss them, vote those ideas up or down based on their priorities.

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The main purpose of the workshop was to interview users of Better Reykjavík to understand what improvements on the platform they felt were urgent and to gain a better understanding

The initial results seem to be that people want more influence and better response from politicians. Some ideas came up how to improve Your Priorities to make it more rewarding and how to inspire politicians to take part.

One improvement that several people talked about was to be able to track better the progress of ideas if they are approved by the local government. This can be solved largely by technology.into what their long term goals are with direct democracy.

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